Outside plant (OSP) telecommunications equipment, including terminations and splitters, may be housed in above-ground, outdoor, protective enclosures such as cabinets.
As demand for telecommunications services increases, optical fiber services are being extended into more and more areas. Often, it is more cost effective to provide for greater service capacity than current demand warrants. This allows a telecommunications service provider to quickly and cost-effectively respond to future growth in demand. Often, telecommunications cabinets are set-up and optical fiber cables are extended to a customer's premises prior to that customer actually requesting or needing service. Such cables may be extended to premises adjacent the premises of a current customer, as it may be cost effective to extend both cables at the same time, or the cables may be extended to new building sites in anticipation of the new occupants of those sites requesting fiber optic service. This creates an easily scalable solution that can provide for high density of connections and aid in connection of new customers to existing connections, expanding fiber optic connectivity on demand.
However, as telecommunications equipment and solutions are simplified and improved in facilitating the expansion of fiber optic connectivity, so is the ease in which unauthorized access can be had to fiber optic connectivity. For example, in the case of an above-ground telecommunications storage cabinet, it is desirable that the equipment be readily accessible as needed by the service technician. However, unauthorized non-customers are finding ways to tamper with such telecommunications equipment to unlawfully gain access to fiber optic connectivity.